Author: Michael Tomasello

Michael Tomasello

Ph.D

Michael Tomasello was born in Bartow, Florida, in 1950 and studied psychology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He received his doctorate in experimental psychology from the University of Georgia in Athens. He became professor of psychology and then of anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta. At the same time, Tomasello conducted psychobiological research at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. In 1998, he was appointed researcher and co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Three years later he became co-director of the Wolfgang Kohler Primate Research Center, which cooperates with the Leipzig Zoo. Tomasello is an honorary professor in psychology at the universities of Leipzig and Manchester, UK. He has authored an impressive list of publications and has been a visiting scholar, professor and instructor at Harvard University, the University of Rome, Stanford University and UC Berkeley. His awards and distinctions include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997 and the Hegel Prize in 2009. In addition to his research achievements, Tomasello has reached out to a wider public in publications, lectures and television programs to explain how humans and apes (or dogs) are similar and how they differ.